A change in the tide
Richard Negus on the rise and wane of fishing in Southwold
First it was the Danes and then the Dutch who tried their best to do their worst for Southwold. After that it was fire, then the Germans, and then the sea. The North Sea is a persistent and heartless neighbour. This notion of a place, scarred by battle, invasion and the forces of nature, runs counter to the bucolic visage most associate with such a beloved seaside resort. William Camden, writing in 1578, said of Southwold “it lieth in the plain, full against the open shore of the sea”. ‘Sole’ has long been the home-place of my maternal family. As far as records go, we know there were Wells’s here in 1750. Most likely there were more in preceding generations, long before James Wells made it onto the parish register; but the fisherfolk then, just as now, were a forgotten people.
As individuals, men like James were deemed inconsequential by the grander burghers, yet the herring, the sprats and flat fish, they caught in Sole Bay made the town, both financially and physically. So valuable was this haul, that it transformed Southwold from merely a beach on which to haul boats (with accompanying shacks), to a place of note. It was fish and fishing that were overwhelmingly responsible for the erection of Southwold’s mighty church of St Edmund, between 1460 -1490. The Town’s dependence on the sea’s harvest was noted by Daniel Defoe when he visited in the 1720s “This is a small port-town upon the coast, at the mouth of a little river call’d the Blith (Blyth): I found no business the people here were employ’d in, but the fishery... for herrings and sprats; which they cure by the help of smoak”.
As the sea borne local economy grew, so did the population. Rows of private cottages were built, followed by corporation housing, then grander villas and mansions. The latter were sited on prominent points, invariably with coastal views. A prosperous upper middle class demographic ‘discovered’ the Town. Southwold by the end of the 19th century bustled, retaining its industrious older self and, but it had also become a popular retirement location for those who’d made money elsewhere and connections to London were possible thanks to a regular paddle steamer. The narrow gauge Southwold railway rattled its ponderous way, sending fish to the mainline station at Halesworth, returning with a cargo of holiday makers. The shifting coastline, wild marshes, quaint Greens, promenade and pier blended with the existing trades of the Town. In 1909, 761 fishing boats, including a large number from Scotland, used Southwold harbour as a base from which to fish for herring. A small army of Scottish women came south each season to prepare and pack the ‘silver darlings’ as the oily fish was known. By 1912, the mixed economy based on and in support of fishing and tourism saw Southwold boom. The Town now boasted plentiful businesses, including: six grocers, one brewery, two rope makers, 122 apartment house owners, three antique dealers, seven bakers, two dressmakers, three doctors surgeries, three ironmongers, two boat builders and a photographer.
When Britain goes to war the coast is hardest bitten. Southwold discovered this in the aftermath of the Kaiser’s declaration of hostilities in 1914. The Town changed forever, physically from Zeppelin raids and the fallen whose names appear on the war memorial outside St Edmunds church. Financial ruin came via the German Naval blockade which ensured few fishing boats put out; those that did rarely left the safety of the bay to hunt herring in the North Sea. This coincided with a natural decline in the herring stocks. The ancillary fishing industries dwindled. Much of the workforce had already left the Town, recruited into the Royal Navy or as in the case of my grandfather Roly Wells, to the mud of the Western Front with The Suffolk Regiment. The Town he returned to in 1918, still carrying shrapnel in his head, was alien. The herring industry was gone.
My mother was born in a two up, two down on Southwold’s High Street in 1937. Roly, her father, had become the Town’s shoemaker after the Great War. He was just one of the growing band of eclectic artisans who serviced the needs of a place that had morphed into an industrial town next to the sea rather than one that made its living from it. Although fishing remained a part of life, it had become a mere ‘bit part’ player. ‘Homeknit’, built a large factory creating luxury garments. Fordux employed over one hundred workers crafting sprung mattresses. The Town formed its own water, gas and electricity companies, Southwold had become a manufacturing town and was essentially self sufficient. Adnams, the town’s brewery, expanded, buying up pubs in the surrounding towns and villages or exporting their beers to ‘furrin parts’. More housing was erected to cater for this new industrialisation. My mother’s family moved out of the High Street, and rented one of the new council houses. “This was the first time we had electricity” she recalls. Their modern pebble dashed semi was far removed from the quaint cottage on the High Street. Alongside electric light she and her parents and three older brothers endured no longer sharing an outside toilet with two other families, the water they drank came out of a tap as opposed to a pump in the yard. Curiously that High Street house, made headline news in the property section of the Daily Telegraph some sixty years later. Estate Agents valued it as the most expensive cottage of its size outside a London postcode.
My mother’s memories of a Southwold childhood sound idyllic. Her earliest recollections are of Luftwaffe raids and of a friend’s dog being killed by a bomb – a war crime for which she never forgave the Nazis. She also told me of the dances she attended on the pier in the 1950s, in playing tennis on the Common, how her father warned her off any contact with the artistic community residing in Walberswick. “Every house in the Town” she noted, “seemed to burst at the seams with people.” “Everyone had a job in Southwold, nobody I knew commuted anywhere” Nor for that matter did those working in the myriad of independent businesses commute into the Town, they lived where they worked. Listening to my mother, Southwold appears like a hive, a self sufficient tight knit hub. There were the social divisions of class between those of the town and those who lived in the town. My grandfather, as the Town’s mace-bearer used the prefix of Colonel when he addressed the Town mayor; sure enough though the Colonel called him ‘Mr Wells’ by return. But such social barriers appeared largely inconsequential to the well-being of the community. Lords and laymen rubbed along. Yet like the tide in Sole Bay, this way of life was changing.
Southwold today is far removed from the autonomous Town of my mother’s or even my own youth. Gone is the industry, bar from Adnams. My cousin Gary is the last born and bred man of Southwold fishing the waters. The handful of other boats plying the sea are crewed by men from Felixstowe or charter vessels for pleasure anglers. The High Street shops are rarely owner run, instead luxury clothing brands and chains predominate. The tourist rules here. The census reveals a permanent population of just 950 people. In the height of summer this rises to over 9,000. The workers’ cottages have been extended and converted to maximise bed spaces, providing plentiful work for builders, but scarce little accommodation for the shop assistants, cleaners and service sector workers who keep the tourism trade on the rails. My mother concedes “It was we locals who can be blamed I suppose. We cashed in when we saw how much the outsiders were prepared to pay for our pokey old houses!” The desirability and stratospheric house pricing in Southwold has arguably been the greatest factor in changing Southwold, much more so than wars, invasion or the sea. That is not to say that Southwold has lost its charm or community spirit, it is simply Southwold people today rarely live in Southwold, they have moved a few miles inland. They still come into Town for weddings, parties, sporting events and a fundraiser or two for the RNLI. I asked my mother if she missed the old days when Southwold buzzed with independent spirit and the High Street twanged with Suffolk accents. “Yes” she said “It is different now, but if we hadn’t changed we would be like poor old Lowestoft*. I suppose we should be grateful really.”
*Lowestoft 13 miles north along the coast from Southwold. It is the most socially deprived town in Suffolk and has been identified as one of the ten most deprived areas in the entire country.
Richard Negus is a hedgelayer and conservationist. His debut book, Words from the Hedge, which is all about rural people, conservation, and lost culture was published earlier this month.